Pakistan Says It Had No Idea Where Osama Bin Laden Was Hiding

Pakistani officials were shocked to learn that Osama bin
Laden was living in a giant mansion in the tony suburban city of
Abbottabad, just down the road from Pakistan's elite military
academy.

In a Washington Post op-ed today, Pakistan's President Asif Ali
Zardari says Bin Laden "was not anywhere we had anticipated he
would be." Zardari goes on to deny that Pakistan had been
knowingly harboring the world's most wanted terrorist.

"Some in the U.S. press have suggested that Pakistan lacked
vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were
disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to
pursuing. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news,
but it doesn't reflect fact. Pakistan had as much reason to
despise al-Qaeda as any nation."

A senior official with Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI,
told the
BBC today that the agency was embarrassed by its failure to
detect Osama Bin Laden. The compound in Abbottabad has not been
"on our radar" since 2003, the official said. (The U.S. says the
compound was
built in 2005.)

But
is it conceivable that bin Laden lived in a wealthy enclave
of retired military generals just 80 miles from Islamabad for
five years and no one in the Pakistani government knew?
It seems more likely that the past decade
of Pakistani denials continues even after bin Laden's death.

Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies run the show in
Pakistan and have close ties to Al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
They had to have known. The question now is how much longer is
the U.S. willing to play the double game?